Ishmael Reed - Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media - The Return of the Nigger Breakers

His voice shaking with rage, a livid Bill Clinton said that Obama’s positions on the war in Iraq were “a fairy tale,” and that nominating Obama was “a roll of the dice.”

Writing in The Washington Post on January 13, 2008, Marjorie Valbrun, voiced the reaction of many blacks to Clinton’s performance:

If anyone needed any proof that the mean Clinton machine is alive and well in this campaign, all they had to do was watch Bill Clinton deliver his angry diatribe against Obama in New Hampshire last week just before the primary. His red-faced anger was clear and a little scary, too. It wasn’t what he said but how he said it. His tone was contemptuous of his wife’s main challenger, whom he described as a political neophyte who for some reason was being granted a honeymoon with the national media.

This is the same Bill Clinton who took on Sister Souljah, a young and, at the time, controversial black rapper who made incendiary racial remarks after the Los Angeles race riots. Many people accused Clinton of using the rapper, and an appearance before Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, as an opportunity to distance himself from Jackson, the ultimate race man. The move helped reinforce his white moderate bona fides.

On January 13, when Tim Russert interrogated Mrs. Clinton as to whether the attacks on Obama by her, her husband, and her surrogates were racist, she filibustered and dismissed such concerns as the one made by Ms. Valbrun and other blacks in a patronizing manner. She falsely accused Obama of comparing himself with JFK and MLK. He didn’t. He invoked their names to make a point about hope. How some hopes, considered false by cynics, can be fulfilled.

So offended by what he considered a black man getting “cocky” with his wife, Clinton blew his top. “Cocky” was the word that nuns-educated Bob Herbert used to admonish Obama. Herbert, one of three blacks whom the Times views as unlikely to alienate their readership, pointed to an exchange between Obama and Mrs. Clinton. When Mrs. Clinton, during a debate, commented that voters found Obama more “likeable” than Mrs. Clinton, Obama said that Mrs. Clinton was “likeable enough.” Obama’s reply prompted an Antebellum white man, Karl Rove, to refer to Obama as “a smarmy, prissy little guy taking a slap at her.” He said that this exchange threw the primary victory to Mrs. Clinton. Notwithstanding the irony of Karl Rove referring to someone as “smarmy,” if a reply as mild and innocuous as Obama’s leads to his being flogged by Clinton and reprimanded by one of the Establishment’s black tokens, Obama is going to be restricted in his ability to take on the political brawlers and hit persons aligned with Clinton, like Don Imus’s buddy, James Carville, a man who sneers at people who live in trailer parks, and who practices a no-holds-barred political strategy.

Both CNN and Carl Bernstein said that Clinton, in the midst of giving this uppity black the required flogging — Clinton’s a Jeffersonian and flogging blacks was Jefferson’s idea of recreation — had misrepresented Barack’s record. Also, those who commented about Hillary Clinton’s tearful breakdown missed the commentary that accompanied this calculated attempt at seeming human and personal, which occurred, as Jesse Jackson, Jr. noted in The Daily News , when her advisors told her that she should appear to be more human. “Why didn’t she cry for the victims of Katrina?” he added.

She said that she didn’t want to see the country “go backwards,” or “spin out of control,” the kind of vision of black rule promoted by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation , and neo-Confederate novelist Tom Wolfe’s A Man In Full . (Unfortunately for Obama, this was during a week that saw post-election violence in Kenya, where Barack’s father was born.) Hers was the kind of rhetoric that was used by the Confederates whose rule was restored by Andrew Johnson. Give the black man governing powers and no white woman will be safe. This was Mrs. Clinton’s Willie Horton moment.

Bill Clinton’s orchestrating his wife’s being more personal was a brilliant stroke: one that might doom Obama’s candidacy, but will doom the Democrats’ chances to win the 2008 election as well. As a Southern demagogue, Bill Clinton calculated that no black man can compete with a white woman’s tears, a left over from Old South thinking. Black men have been lynched as a result of the tears of white women. While Jesse Helms, another Southern demagogue, used a black man’s hand in an ad that criticized affirmative action, feminist Bill Clinton, who exploited a young woman who held him in awe — and cost Al Gore an election — used his wife’s tears, so desperate was he to achieve a third term and redeem his being impeached. But judging from angry black callers into C-Span’s The Washington Journal the day after the New Hampshire primary and the following day, and from my own non-scientific survey, many blacks finally get it. That they have been snookered by the Clintons. One angry man said that blacks supported Clinton during his marital problems and this is what they get for it. Another man said that he was going to vote for McCain as a way of protesting the Clintons’ treatment of Obama. On January 11, an irate black woman called in and said that she had been devoted to the Clintons since the 1990s, but after his attack on Obama, which she likened to “a knife in my chest,” and which she described as “low down,” she said that if Hillary were nominated, she’d either “vote Republican, or stay home.” Calling into the Journal on January 13, a black woman from Ohio said that many of her friends were upset with the “subliminally racist” campaign against Obama that the Clintons were conducting. These callers expressed the disgust that thousands of blacks feel about the Clintons’ dirty-tricks campaign against Obama, which included sending out mailers making false statements about his view about abortion, and deceptively attributing another mailer, critical of Obama, to John Edwards. This black backlash against the Clintons provides the Republican Party with a golden opportunity to recruit black voters for McCain, but I doubt whether they will seize upon it. After all, while Clinton might have an office in Harlem, McCain has a black daughter!

A black PhD caller said that he found blacks in a barbershop to be more prescient than he. They said that once whites entered the voting booth, they’d vote for the white candidate no matter what they said to the pollster. Some commentators recalled treatment that Harvey Gantt and Tom Bradley received. Pollsters considered both to be shoo-ins for senator from North Carolina and governor of California because whites misled pollsters about how they really intended to vote.

Later in the day of January 8, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, appearing on The Chris Matthews Show , commented about a previous segment during which Dee Dee Meyers and Pat Buchanan opposed Michael Eric Dyson’s argument that white racism was a factor in Obama’s New Hampshire defeat. He said, “I think its very naïve, given American history, to automatically dismiss the racial voting theory before it’s investigated. There is some evidence that race is one of several factors involved in this upset.” Chris Matthews, who, apparently, has taken a new look at racism in the United States, after the Imus debacle, and a couple of other white commentators, including NBC News Political Director, Chuck Todd, agreed with this sentiment that race was a factor. But most white commentators agreed with Pat Buchanan and Dee Dee Meyers, former Clinton press secretary, who said that the difference between the polling that showed Obama with a double digit lead and the actual outcome had nothing to with white voters telling pollsters one thing and voting the opposite. For people like Pat Buchanan, nothing has to do with race, unless he can use race to stir up votes in one of his campaigns.